The House of Representatives is expected to vote on the royalties bill this week.
The government announced it will negotiate with members of Congress to secure approval of the Senate's version, which allocates R$ 4 billion to education and healthcare in 2014, funded by oil revenues from the three active oil fields in the country, according to the bill approved by the Senate.
Mariana Tokarnia
Reporter from Agência Brasil
Brasilia The Chamber of Deputies is expected to vote this week on the proposal regarding the allocation of oil exploration revenues to education and healthcare. The Senate has only announced that, next year, R$ 4 billion will be allocated to these two sectors, coming from royalties paid for oil exploration in the three active fields in the country, according to the bill approved by the House.
Technicians from the Chamber of Deputies have already calculated that the proposal approved by the senators would result in a reduction of R$ 170,9 billion in the allocation to these areas, out of the nearly R$ 280 billion foreseen by the project approved in this House of the Legislature.
The government announced it will negotiate with members of parliament to get the Senate's version of the bill approved. Parliamentarians are coordinating, and the deputies will decide whether to approve or reject the bill as it came from the Senate. Civil organizations are mobilizing to pressure Congress for more resources for education.
According to a report by the Mineral, Water and Energy Resources Consultancy of the Chamber of Deputies, authored by consultant Paulo César Ribeiro Lima, from 2013 to 2022, under the Senate's substitute bill, additional revenues for health and education from oil exploration would reach R$ 108,1 billion, while with the Chamber's proposal, they would total between R$ 261,4 billion and R$ 279 billion, "without conservatism," as specified in the House's technical note. With the changes, education resources will be reduced from R$ 209,3 billion to R$ 97,4 billion, and health resources will fall from R$ 69,7 billion to R$ 10,7 billion – based on non-conservative projections.
On Friday (5), the government leader in the Senate, Eduardo Braga (PMDB-AM), tried to clarify the points he considered “erroneous premises” in the text approved by the Chamber. In a technical note, the leader says that the changes introduced in the Senate sought to improve the text approved in the Chamber, minimizing the risk of litigation and avoiding the misuse of the Social Fund.
The bill approved in the Chamber of Deputies stipulates that 50% of the fund's capital must go to education and health. However, the bill approved in the Senate will allocate half of the fund's income to education, as was the case in the original bill sent by President Dilma Rousseff to the National Congress.
Braga says he doesn't know exactly how much will be allocated to education, stating that "this could vary." The senator, however, acknowledged that the royalties revenue is not enough to guarantee 10% of the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) for education, even if 100% of these resources were exclusively dedicated to the field.
According to Luiz Araújo, a master's degree holder in public education policy from the University of Brasília, "the text approved by the Chamber of Deputies is welcome, even if it doesn't solve everything." "I think it's a step backward to approve the text that the Senate approved, a demonstration that the voices of the streets were ignored. It's impossible to guarantee a 'FIFA standard,' that is, high quality, without increasing resources."
Gil Vicente Reis Figueiredo, a professor of financial mathematics at the Federal University of São Carlos (UFSCar), projected how much would be allocated to education under the original text of Provisional Measure 592/12 – a text that essentially remained the same in the bill sent to the Chamber of Deputies by the government. The professor also believes that the Senate's approval of the text represents a step backward. "What came out of the Chamber was heading in the right direction, and in the Senate it was amended in a very complicated way."
To reach the 10% of GDP allocated to education, as foreseen in the National Education Plan (PNE), Figueiredo, who is also a member of the National Association of Directors of Federal Higher Education Institutions (Andifes), advocates for an increase in the allocation of federal, state, and municipal revenues to the sector. According to the Federal Constitution, 18% of federal revenue and 25% of state and municipal revenues must go to education. The professor argues that this percentage should rise to 20% for the federal government and 30% for municipalities.
Edited by: Carolina Pimentel